August Update

Ask any dedicated birder which season they prefer, and they’ll almost always say fall. Birds decide to migrate at a leisurely pace just as human schedules peak with school and work in September. Nevertheless, birders love fall because rarities can appear anywhere and, unlike in spring, often linger for days. Not only that, but the migrants and rarities just keep coming, not for the paltry two weeks we get in May, but for *months*. In August, juvenile shorebirds begin to replace the hurried adults that passed through unnoticed in July. By September we get warblers, then NFC thrushes, raptors, then October loads of sparrows, then oh my gosh Ducks, and….by November, GULLS! This is how a birder thinks. However, we might do well to pause to consider how excited we were about the current date a month ago!

To kick off the season, I recently accompanied local Chattanooga birder and budding world traveler Luke Thompson down to the Black Belt Birding Festival in Alabama. Events included sparring with opponents blindfolded while identifying as many birds by ear as possible within twenty minutes. OK, just kidding—The festival is actually named for a unique region of southern Alabama with dark, limestone-rich soil that is ideal for agriculture. I’d heard about this festival last year and was curious enough to attend this time, wondering why anyone would hold a birding event in sweltering August heat with minimal birdsong.

I quickly learned the Black Belt Birding Festival holds hidden gems for birders. On the way down, we stopped at the Talladega National Forest to see the endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker. The entire area features catfish ponds that rival even sewage ponds for bird diversity, without the unpleasant smell. I’ve never seen so many Wood Storks in one place! Apparently, these birds wander here from Florida in late summer to molt while feasting on catfish. It wasn’t at all unusual to spot the mischievous Mississippi Kite or the spectacular Swallow-tailed Kite, even right over downtown Greensboro.

BirdingApp recently added basic support for festivals, which displays a banner at the top of the app “Welcome to the Black Belt Birding Festival!” to anyone nearby the festival. Due to a developer error, this banner briefly appeared for everyone on the app as soon as I arrived at the festival! Once the free advertising snafu was fixed, the feature proved handy, offering a quick link to the festival schedule right in the app. Handing out stickers is easy, but convincing birders to pause and download a new app is tough. If they had, they’d have seen a fantastic monologue about my birding adventures in the nearby chat, plus my rare bird alert for the first Marengo County record of a Sanderling!

The wayward Sanderling found a fantastic and under-birded place called Spillway Park, featuring a dam with a vast area of shallow rushing water beneath. This area was filled with over a hundred Least Sandpipers, several Pectoral and Semipalmated Sandpipers, and waders of all sorts around the edges—all easily scopeable from an elevated trail. A nearby nature trail had a mix of breeders and migrants, including Acadian Flycatcher, Northern Parula, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and even a Swainson’s Warbler. This spot would be interesting to bird at any time of year, I’m sure. The weekend ended with exactly 100 species on the tally—not bad at all for early August!

On the way home, Luke and I took a (not insignificant) detour to the famed Fowler Rd. Irrigation Pond, which was just starting to dry out enough to attract some Caspian Terns and Pectoral Sandpipers. As we near the end of August, this place has already attracted Wilson’s and Red-necked Phalaropes, American Golden-Plover, Upland Sandpiper, and even a Piping Plover!

Unfortunately, the best shorebird spots are typically far away from where most birders live. How can BirdingApp help you at a time of year when the places you like to bird are so distant? One thing you can do is browse to a hotspot on the map and open up the hotspot chat, to share and read messages that were sent nearby that spot. BirdingApp is also the only app that provides an inclusive and universal solution for real-time rarity sharing. For more on this, please see our February update:

If you’re lucky enough to find a rarity this fall, be sure to post an RBA in BirdingApp! For the rest of the fall, we’ll continue making improvements to the app, and we will as always be posting fun and challenging quizzes in the Birding Arena.

Happy Fall Birding,

Tim and Alex